Archive for the ‘Coronavirus’ Category

They are “young”, a fleeting notion in humans, and they scoff:”I want to go out and have fun! Why should I care that a few old folks may die?” Fun? What fun? Why at happened to the struggle against Nazism? Was not that a struggle to cancel those who wanted to help “natural selection” and kill whom they viewed as the weak? What do those “young” mean by “fun”? Is killing old people fun, then? Getting together and inebriating, namely drugging their brains out of commission? OK, I admit that if I had a brain as deranged as theirs, I would probably try to shut it down using alcohol, marihuana, opiates, glues and what not, too!

In France, one of their own, one of these “young”, described as a party girl, died from COVID 19. She was 16. In California a teen, age 14, died. In Illinois, Cook County, a ten month old infant died. A principal of a school, not even 40 years old, died in New York.

OK, easy for me to say: I was never a party girl, or a party animal. Why? Out of self-respect for my mind, which has always spurned mobs, and herd thinking (speaking of herd, how is that “herd immunity” working for you, you the COVID, Boris Johnson? Your government was idiotically promoting “herd immunity“, two weeks ago… Conclusion: COVID exploded in the UK. That it exploded in France for the same reason, weeks earlier, is not excuse…)

So tell me, brainless youth scofflaws who think death and suffering happens only to others? “What is the difference between you and young Nazis? Young Nazis also wanted to have fun, gathering, flocking, and bellowing, all together.”

The “youth” is not smart, because the “youth” has been brainwashed to admire brainless plutocrats such as muscle man Kobe Bryant… Bryant was notorious to fly all around, despising climate and people. Well, fog killed him… But he dragged children in his death. Actually I know 40 something lawyer who claimed she had the worst day in her life when Kobe died. She was crying all over Facebook. What about Kobe’s 13 year old daughter, and her friend on the same flight?

A week ago, I met a flock of twenty-somethings on top of a hill in a park. They were going up as a tight group, two dozens of them, talking loud. They were abreast of a fire road, I squeezed along them, up wind (because I am smart). One of them said aloud:”And they tell us if we cough here, they will die down there in the valley!” They all laughed. The first houses were several miles away.

“Raoult’s critics have pointed to problems with the protocol of his testing and worrying side effects of the drug… At least one person has already died in the US after self-medicating with a non-pharmaceutical version of the drug used for cleaning fish tanks.”

Both statements are commonly reproduced all over the same idiotic media which was trashing Trump as racist and keen to distract from impeachment, after he called a public health emergency and closed the border to China, January 31… and idiotic. The product to clean aquariums is a chemical combination with phosphate, made to kill all life. Of course, if one swallows it, one dies. The “side effects” of “the drug” are nothing. I took both drugs many times and for quite a long time, both to fight malaria and pneumonia. My mom had a heart problem, perhaps in part for using quinine, but she used it for ten years, both for malaria and another medical condition. This being said, right, quinine can attack the cardiac muscle.

The idiocy of such comments show the hatred bias of those who proffer them. Another common barb at Raoult is that his studies are “observational”, not “double blind”. But actually Raoult had controls (2 groups outside of his 24 patients; now he has an 80 patients study out, same results).

Unphased by the clamoring negativists full of hatred, Trump requisitioned sixteen million (16 x 10^6) doses of hydroxychloroquine from three pharmaceutical companies (March 30, 2020 press conference). Contrarily to what the rabid anti-Trumpers have been claiming, the evidence that this Raoult drug works is great (and dates more than a decade).

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Idiots love idiocy. This love for idiocy is often the main reason why they’re idiots. Pointing out idiocies to idiots, who are idiots by choice and will, make them more idiotic, because they crave idiocy, and want to splurge.

Where does this love for idiocy come from? Laziness is a big factor; thinking is hard, energetically expensive, because it’s expensive to reorganize one’s brain neural networks

Idiots don’t just find intelligence more expensive that they can afford, they hate intelligence, and that entices them to become ever more idiotic: idiots are smart enough to feel that idiocy is the greatest remedy to that intelligence they are unable to experience!

Honorable commenter Ronald Scheckelhoff observes: “I think that in some cases the mechanics of untruth are machinated by lies, but in other cases by disinterest, and in still other cases by ignorance, so it’s quite a stew of causes that’s driving the current crop of bad decisions.”

Laziness is indeed an important driver of generalized stupidity. Thinking is hard, entertainment easy. That’s why people prefer to admire Kobe, a basketball player, a ethically corrupt, not so gentle man, who had his family fly in pea soup so thick police helicopters were grounded, and cars could only be driven very slowly. Ethically corrupt? He got children killed, flying in that pea soup: the helicopter couldn’t land, too much fog, it was put on a holding pattern.

Kobe was an ethical disaster, a model exactly of not what to follow, precisely because he was not smart. This demonstrates, not that this was necessary, that basketball stars don’t have to be smart. No elementary thinking is necessary in this activity, to be a tremendous success making the females juice up, and the teens hope they get lucky too… But then the question is why are such idiots brandished as what the youth should emulate? No wonder, then that the “youth” think it’s OK to kill everybody (else).

Suggesting that whom, and what, one admires or is fascinated by, is an ethical problem may sound to some as far fetched. But actually the notion is not new, and was implicit in many past ethical systems (for example Judeo-Christo-Islamism).

Want a better world?

Start with better role models to adulate, and thus, emulate. And better fields to admire, and long to contribute to. We need to understand biology better, not to refine the art of oversized specimens apt to put the ball into baskets.

Mercantilist economic policies aimed to build up the state, commerce and industry, and Mercantilist theorists charged the state with looking for ways to strengthen the economy… [1]

The Internet is manipulated by the censors which its extremely wealthy owners pay. Many of these geeks have low levels of education, and see offense where there is none. Before getting on Quora today I got a warning that one of my comments violated their policy, and I had to sign an electronic document telling me I was going to be banned, should I do it again. [2]

My comment was entirely technical… and in economy. There were no attack against any member of Quora. There were no insults against people dead or alive. I just sung the praises of “Mercantilism”, an economic theory under which most powers operated for many centuries. I referred to an essay explaining the distinction between “Mercantilism” and “Colbertism”. I cannot imagine why the comment was banned. Actually the 6.2 trillion dollar package just passed is an example of Colbertism… Everybody agrees to save Boeing, that’s Colbertism. I cannot possibly imagine why such a comment would be banned. But it was. We are dealing here with people who micromanage thinking and scholarship. First comic relief:

The Anti-Trumpers are completely insane, but, you know what? It works! As Hitler said, the bigger the lie, the more plausible it sounds. NYT had an article claiming:”Trump to New York: Drop Dead!” The hatred this sort of insanity brings actually makes the anti-Trumpers even more full of righteousness and hatred…

I was answering Peter Malmutt who wrote:

This stimulus was absolutely necessary because as you highlight, no economy no money. While this is structured very differently to the TARP (lessons learned, esp not to trust desperate bankers) and equity positions in some corporates could be an outcome, doesn’t this look like quasi-socialism? Isn’t that something that is taboo for the Republican Party ideology, although they also used to hold strong views on balanced budgets and maximum national debt levels?

In a first comment, I said that, indeed, it was socialism. Then I wrote the following comment, deleted by Quora:“People who voted Republican in the past wanted to stay wealthy. In a static world, it meant balanced budgets and absolute limits on debt, to insure the value of money. However, the world is not static anymore. Europe is balancing budgets, and getting ever more poor, relatively speaking. The US and UK have been profligate: it works.

If the USA had balanced its budget in World War Two, the completely unbalanced Nazis would have won… The USA sent, for free, absolutely gigantic quantities of planes, tanks, trucks, to the USSR… Enough to turn the tide… Similarly the UK got immensely indebted to the USA to stay in the war. At the end of the war, the USSR had no industrial capacity (it was in the USA) and the UK had to surrender to the USA…

The COVID19 is an occasion for the hard sci fi edge of the US economy to get ahead… Firms like Gilead… Republicans have come to realize that one has to stay ahead, if one wants to thrive… Ahead of the virus, but not just the virus, as governor Cuomo said today… Trump is a billionaire entrepreneur who made his fortune inside the USA, and was long an enemy of the Reagan Revolution (he prefered subsidies… ;-))… And thus a left wing Democrat, relative to say, Biden or Clinton…Trump literally captured the Republican Party and has been able to harness this new way of creating wealth… Just like the old one, ruling all over Europe and the USA, it’s called MERCANTILISM, but one should call it in its most striking version, COLBERTISM…Colbert Good, Keynes Not So Smart (https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/colbert-good-keynes-not-so- “

Why was the comment deleted?

Probably because some plutocrat saw it, and perceived that it could be viewed as complementary to Trump (in spite of the crack about subsidies… and it’s true Trump harnessed New York construction subsidies, that’s why the NY gov set up subsidies…). Then the plutocrat, or servant thereof signaled to Quora one better terrorize that author, whose entire “answer” could be interpreted as all too favorable to Trump… Never mind that I approved of a BIPARTISAN BILL…

“President Trump has turned to a French virologist with a history of criticizing climate science to offer the world hope amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.” Actually Raoult criticised poor meteorological predictions… which have gone indeed pretty bad recently, because the climate is changing too fast. But the TDS crowd has no limit:

“Last week, Trump tweeted that the combination of two medicines could dramatically alter the often deadly course of COVID-19.

“HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,” Trump wrote. He then cited a study published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents that afforded little time for peer review.”

Notice the viciousness: the paper was actually PEER REVIEWED in the most prestigious Journal. And published by said Journal. But now hacks who probably never studied calculus or biology are telling us that the peer review had “little time”. Yeah, guys, thousands of people are dying everyday.

PhD Raoult is the greatest star in his domain… And an MD, so he prescribed his drug, hydroxychloroquine, to more than 4,000 patients: it’s safer than quinine (which I got for years).

The World Wide Web is a treasure. But it’s full of parasites, vermin, viruses… How to distinguish truth from lies is difficult. Over the years I was banned from many Internet outlets, for “fantastic thinking” (the guy who accused me of this was the Harvey Weinstein of philosophy, a serial rapist), or from the European Tribune for having suggested that bankers bankrolled Hitler (they made an Internet search, they said, to prove only me in the entire world had this theory… It’s how the wealth of the Bush family was launched…), or the Daily Kos, for saying Obamacare would make the profit of the healthcare insurance industry greater (it did), or from the Guardian, for being a Jihadist… The fatwa against me from Pakistan Justice (!) Ministry for offending the famous Rophet, a proof, no doubt… Etc.

There should be a law of public utility forbidding censorship… Ah, but as a New York Times subscriber, for decades, I was censored more than 1,000 times… Sanders wanted such a law… But Sanders didn’t want to hurt Biden’s feelings… Thus demonstrating a congenital inability to become US president…

WW Web is Direct Democracy. The political system we have is Democracy through Representatives… Basically, as in China. Direct Democracy has to develop Debate Expertise. This is not a new debate: Socrates was obsessed by the notion of Direct Democracy versus Expertise. What I call “Democratic Institutions” were developed, in the Middle Ages, to answer Socrates. However they turned out to have seen their would-be Expertise been devoured by Will To Power. So now we have anonymous censors without any education telling us “Mercantilism” is an insult.

In any case, Marx, Engels, Proudhon (their inspiration) fustigated the owners of the workers. Now one should fustigate the owners, or more exactly enslavers of thoughts.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The Wikipedia entry on Mercantilism I linked to is extremely bad, and denotes an anti-Mercantilist bias. That’s because Mercantilism is nationalistic, whereas the plutocratic globalization was leveraging internationalism to avoid taxation and legislation… Servants of plutocrats probably wrote the article… I will not bother modifying it: total loss of time, I would get in a fight with arrogant poisonous mice…

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[2] Quora is an Internet outfit with intellectual pretense. It covers the full spectrum from unfathomably stupid, to extremely interesting… Depending upon who wrote the article, and what it is about.

Infectious disease top world expert, professor Didier Raoult, discoverer of dozens of bacteria, an MD and PhD, leads a very large lab and institute he created in Marseilles [1]. Raoult’s findings are found in thousands of publications. Among many other things, he identified the causative agents of several diseases and discovered giant viruses… plausibly a new form of life, no less. (No doubt, if Raoult was American, or, a fortiori Swedish, he would already be a laureate of the Nobel Prize!)

When French citizens were evacuated from China by military flights, they were put under Raoult’s supervision.

These are the first trial data. Yes this was a small trial, and it was open-label (as people are dying conducting double blind experiments is deeply unethical). However, the results are so striking, these objections can be overridden (larger scale studies have been launched in France).

26 patients were enrolled in the treatment group, with 16 controls. Six patients dropped out of the treatment group: 3 went to the ICU, one dropped out due to nausea, one left the hospital (apparently recovered?) and one died. No one left the two control groups. 15 male and 21 female patients were treated. 6 of them were asymptomatic, 22 had upper respiratory symptoms, and 8 had lower respiratory tract symptoms (all of those had confirmed COVID19 pneumonia by imaging).

The treatment group got 200mg of hydroxychloroquine sulfate three times a day. Six of those patients were also given 500mg azithromycin in addition. The antibiotic dealt with possible bacterial superinfection. Professor Raoult also uses azithromycin for its antiviral effects.

There appears to be an effect of hydroxychloroquine. The effect of the hydroxychloroquine – azithromycin combination is notably stronger effect: down to zero virus as measured by nasal swab, in five (5) days.

These are two inexpensive generic drugs with a long history of use in humans. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine both can have notable side effects, for example, cardiopathy. However, that happens only under chronic usage for cramps (that was discontinued in the USA in the 2000s, for this particular pathology). Brought up in Black Africa, I got malaria more than once, and was given longer treatments of chloroquine. The treatment of Raoult is only a few days, and should have no adverse effects. Also, as in the case of malaria, chloroquine can be used prophylactically.

It better work; absent a treatment, COVID19 will be a disaster equal to the “Spanish Flu” of 1918, said, correctly, the Senator head of the Intelligence Committee who admitted to have engaged on insider trading after he was privately briefed. Biden claimed that “Medicare For All, doesn’t work” in Italy. He and his well-heeded PAC and media supporters insisted M4A was the cause of the massacre there.

However, the USA has, relative to its population, fewer ICU and critical respiratory beds than Italy. Simply, because it blocked (non-US) people coming from China on January 31, the US is delayed by ten days the contagion relative to Italy 9the EU incompetently didn’t block this travel). Expect thousands of Americans to die. And don’t expect the disease to threaten less when it’s warmer: SARS-CoV-2 is progressing in tropical areas… Just as SARS-CoV did.

Patrice Ayme

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Didier Raoult (born March 13, 1952) is a French biologist. He holds MD and Ph.D. degrees and specializes in infectious diseases. In 1984, Didier Raoult created the Rickettsia Unit at Aix-Marseille University (AMU). He also teaches infectious diseases in the Faculty of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University, and since 1982 has supervised many M.D. and Ph.D. degrees.[1]

Since 2008, Raoult has been the director of “URMITE” i.e. the Research Unit in Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases, collaborating with CNRS (National Center for the Scientific Research), IRD (Research for the Development Institute), INSERM (National Institute of Health and Medical Research) and the Aix Marseille University, in Marseille. His laboratory employs more than 200 people, including 86 very active researchers who publish between 250 and 350 papers per year and have produced more than 50 patents.[2] Didier Raoult is also involved in the creation of 8 startups to date.

Giant Viruses:

In 2003, Didier Raoult identified with Bernard La Scola a giant amoebic virus, mimivirus,[16] and in 2004 established its genome.[17]

In 2016, this team found in mimivirus a defense mechanism preventing the implantation of virophages in the virus plant (MIMIVIRE).[18] Finally, it has been shown that this virophage could be integrated into the cells in the form of a pro-virophage and that it could be associated with transposon-like structures called transpovirons.[19]

The discovery of giant viruses seriously undermines the classification of viruses. Didier Raoult has several times reported that giant viruses are of a different nature than other viruses and that they constitute a 4th branch of microbes known as TRUC for “Things Resisting Uncompleted Classifications”